Greetings, I have not posted anything in forever and for that I am very, very sorry. I just haven't had much to talk about.. but since this came up and it's bothering me, here we go. Comic books (particularly superhero comics) and age ranges/limits - Recently a fellow librarian asked for help on suggestions for tween comics. I named a few more recent ones that are for a kid/tween/teen demographic and then explained that most older comics would also be appropriate for this age group. At this age, I was reading New Teen Titans and Uncanny X-men for instance without any issues. I specifically stated that comics, particularly superhero comics, have largely been "all ages" for most of their history. This angered the librarian who I made the recommendations too. This librarian told me they specifically wanted TWEEN books because it was helpful for parents, tweens, and librarians and they needed to be TWEEN. Also that older books were too dated and the color and art wasn'
So we've talked about how superhero comes walk you through the process of recognizing citations and citing your sources and how the Easter eggs and references cause the reader to do research, now we're going to talk about a subject everyone knows and confronts regularly in research.. bias. Comics, like most storytelling mediums, have a built in way to show bias. Some of this is from the obvious storytelling tricks of showing different perspectives. Comics like Marvels or Astro City do this rather well, taking the reader out of the typical head space of the superhero and into the world around them, those who look up and see the superheroes in their world and how that impacts them. These, however, are more subtle ways that the comics confront, show, and reveal the concept of bias to readers. The most obvious tools that comics have are characters that are implicitly and strongly biased. For instance, Marvel has the infamous J. Jonah Jameson, who has a one man war against Sp